Eco-Friendly
Environmentally friendly, environment-friendly, eco-friendly, nature-friendly, and green are terms referring to goods and habitats, services, laws, guidelines and policies that inflict reduced, minimal, or no harm upon ecosystems or the environment

Finding a way to replace regular, concrete roads with ones that could better serve a sustainable world has long been Scott and Julie Brusaw’s dream. The couple’s Solar Roadways project, which aims to replace traditional asphalt and concrete roadways with solar panels that are covered with four-square-foot glass hexagon panels. The glass panels are designed not only to withstand the heaviest of trucks, but are also textured, encouraging tires to grip the surface and water to run off. The solar panels underneath generate energy from the sun, which can not only power nearby communities, but also the electric vehicles that drive above them.

Greenwashing” is a term that is starting to permeate the English lexicon. It’s a form of marketing spin that is applied to products to make them more appealing to environmentally conscious consumers. It takes little to greenwash a product, sometimes changing a label to imply that it’s more environmentally safe is all it takes.

Northwestern University researchers are the first to develop a new solar cell with good efficiency that uses tin instead of lead perovskite as the harvester of light. The low-cost, environmentally friendly solar cell can be made easily using “bench” chemistry—no fancy equipment or hazardous materials.

Rather than building a brand new home, it can often make more sense to renovate an existing home and bring it in line with modern standards. This 1930s property was transformed into a passively-cooled home, complete with a modern extension that both adds space and contributes to its considerable charm.

More Americans are using trains, buses, and subways rather than cars for work commuting. Voters in Los Angeles are so fed up with traffic that, by the end of 2014, LA Metro will have started construction on multiple new heavy and light rail projects that will become operational over the next decade.